I love the fact that Finnish doesn’t have a way of saying please, so you just thank the person instead. The first time I was in Finland I learned to say “excuse me, I don’t speak Finnish, do you speak English?”, and because that was the only thing I learned I wanted to learn to pronounce it correctly, so I took the time and effort to learn how to pronounce it. The problem when I do this, is that most people don’t learn basic niceties, and even the ones that do tent to mangle pronunciation, so native people think I’m kidding because it sounds like some native saying they don’t speak the language. Also because the majority of interactions with people are simple “hello”, “thanks”, “bye” I like to pick up on those by listening to people, but not by studying it or anything.

All of that setup for this stupid story: One day I go to a supermarket and the lady tells me “Moi” (hi) and with the same cheerful tone of voice I’ve seen people use I replied with “Moi Moi” (bye bye). I had seen people use both Moi and Moi Moi, but hadn’t noticed that one was hi and the other was bye, so I was accidentally cheerfully rude, and I still feel bad about it. If you’re out there, I’m so sorry supermarket lady in Helsinki, I’m just a dumb tourist trying to be nice.